Making room for the dark

Finding time to take things slow is incredibly hard in the fast-paced day-to-day. Many artists with families at home know this well.

Multidisciplinary photographer Jon Reid hasn’t had an opportunity to step back inside the darkroom in close to nine years. When his first child was born, the carefully processed negatives of his earlier work had to be substituted for commercial client shoots, many of which continue to have him commuting to Sydney on a weekly basis.

As well as time, limits in space are a factor that impact an artist’s ability to create. Jon has occupied a number of Renew studio spaces in the past, and although having executed countless client projects from those office spaces, a location enabling him to delve back into the world of darkroom photography hadn’t been a possibility until now.

Alongside fellow Renew photographer Edwina Richards, Jon carefully built a professional darkroom within the former conference space of their current Clocktower Studios location. It’s within this new space that Jon foresees an eventual return to platinum printing, a 19th century process that he recalls as “an extraordinarily fickle thing but if you get it right, it’s extremely beautiful”.

With numerous Sydney clients, university courses in photographic technique to teach, and a body of work in architecture photography to pursue, Jon is working towards finding time for the darkroom once more.

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